Dylan, now feeling the glowing green alcohol, guffawed. “I don’t give a shit. I’m leaving anyway. They can monitor the crap out of me. I don’t give a damn if it was just a program, or code, or whatever, a binary simulation. Love, anger, resentment, revenge—my feelings were real. So what if the memories were fabricated? They felt real; they were all-encompassing. Our product works, for better or worse.”
“Yeah, maybe a little too well,” Frank agreed. “I really hope they figure out that damn bug soon.”
“They will,” Dylan said reassuringly. “They have the best person on it.” Frank raised his eyebrows questioningly, to which Dylan responded, “Kristina. She’ll figure it out. And I’ll still be coming back to SolipstiCorp occasionally—they’re still testing me, they need to ensure the best care. I could sue you guys into oblivion if I wanted to.”
“We appreciate your benevolence.” Frank polished off his glowing drink. “Well, Dyls, I gotta get outta here. It’s been fun. But I’m hitting Vegas tonight with a few old college buddies.”
“Vegas? Tonight?”
“Yeah, we’re taking the new hyperLoop, twenty minutes from San Diego to Vegas. That’s less time than it’ll take me to find a good hooker once I get there!” Frank’s face turned down as he continued. “So I should expect your resignation letter on Monday, then?”
“Yep, that’s correct. Sorry, man. Thanks for being a great boss.” Dylan stuck out his hand and added, “And I mean that.”
Frank ignored Dylan’s handshake, replying instead, “Fuck you for leaving, you whiny son of a bitch.”
And with that, Frank slammed down his glowing green highball and walked briskly out of the bar, careful not to miss staring at a few good asses on his way out.
Chapter Twenty-One
The fog didn’t roll in as much as it bumbled its way onto shore. It happened quickly—one minute it was a comfortable twenty-two degrees, ten minutes later it was a moist fifteen. Sindhu hadn’t brought a jacket, and much of her lithe back was now exposed to the bitter breath of the sea. She wore a small, tight-fitting plain brown shirt that was cut lower on the back than on the front. Had her long hair not covered it up, a stranger’s leering eyes may have noticed the subtle black aniToo on her back. The aniToo rained small Tamil letters—the antique script from her homeland—from the tips of her shoulders down to her lower back, where the letters would bounce slightly, eventually coming to rest, spelling out a long-since-forgotten Tamil proverb. Under calm circumstances, the letters would gently float down her back, drifting featherlike. During physical exertion the letters would fall chaotically. When she slept, the letters would lay gently upon her back. Should she somehow stand upside down, the Tamil script letters would follow gravity toward her shoulders. Currently, the letters were vibrating as they fell, matching the shivering of her body due to the piercing cold.
Sindhu frowned. She hadn’t fought the public light-rail system to arrive at this godforsaken run-down beach town for the cheap clam chowder—penurious though she was. She stood from the bench she had been sitting upon and was about to dump the plate that had held her chowder bread bowl into a nearby compost bin, when one of the many beach-faring vagrants snatched the plate out of her hand. The man wore a discarded and defective suit made of aniFabric; one pixel of blue was flickering pathetically near the man’s right knee, where the remaining pant leg had been tied up at the man’s stump of a shin. Portions of the man’s face were scabbed over, and the rest bled slightly through open sores. His milky-white eyes appeared blind; an assertion validated by Sindhu as she watched the man search the plate for food. He grumbled nonsensically to himself.
A desensitization to the sight of those suffering from dermatrophy was not easily obtained. Sindhu was a hard woman, but she would never feel comfortable around these zombielike elders. After she had settled into her nonprofit job, she had begun taking part in charity work during her weekends. Most of the work involved free health clinics or simply providing food and water to the slums. The dermatrophy subjects at these events were grotesque, there was no denying it. Many compared the affliction to that of leprosy. The moraligious and bioligious portions of the population claimed that these people got what they deserved: a disease-ridden existence in exchange for their heretical desire to live an unnaturally long life. A minority of the wealthy also felt these pus-ridden people got what they deserved: insanity-riddled old age caused by a desire to spend what little money they had for a futile chance to live long enough to obtain more life—the riskiest investment on earth. The vast majority of the population had no idea how prevalent the problem had become. They turned a blind eye to the slum-cleanup crews that their corp tax dollars were paying for. Sanitation and inspection crews were innocuously named, but their primary charter was cleaning up the dead. The ignorant majority also turned a blind eye to the public lands that were now entirely filled with government-assisted slums. Miniature microeconomies, each one, where bartering for services and food had replaced the standard currency. The ignorant majority also turned a blind eye to the cheap public transportation, dirty but effective—and that was also funded from corp tax dollars—as the corp employees drove on their corp-owned and -funded, technologically enhanced roads. The ignorant majority also turned a blind eye to the lack of affordable education: More than 95 percent of the population could not afford to attend college; simple technological advancements could have been put to use, as India had done, but government spending had been the political lightning rod of the past century. The cost to simply care for the lower class had not eclipsed 50 percent of the government’s expenditures; education was merely a luxury the public couldn’t afford.
Initially, Sindhu had been startled by the state of the lower class within the United States. She had a vision from her childhood that the United States was a beacon of prosperity within the world, where anyone could succeed, even the poorest of the poor. In actuality, the separation of the classes within the US had become more extreme than any other industrialized country, due to the lack of controls on birth coupled with the cost of education. During the twenty-first century, every country—except the United States—had enacted some type of birth control; whether it was China’s strict legal enforcement, or the EU’s proactive enforcement through tax benefits for having fewer children. Meanwhile, India had set their radical precedent—genetic enforcement—which the rest of the world was quickly following. In the past decade, India’s genetic enforcement of childbearing had led to a boon in the their economy, and a clear dent in the population of the lower classes was beginning to form. The nature of India’s lead in this area could not be challenged.
However, to be truly great at class inequality, a country could not just focus on having an outstanding mass of destitutes, they also needed to promote an opulence achievable only by a select group. And the United States had succeeded with flying colors on both fronts during the twenty-second century. Recent estimates from the 2111 census (obtained from intrusive but legal digital monitoring coupled with microdetailed satellite surveys) placed 99 percent of the income with 5 percent of the people. There was no middle. Income had become a teeter-totter; if somehow you could become fat enough, your corpulence would totter you over to the rich, never to return to the poor. But, the fact of the matter was that the people were born into their teeter or totter positions; moving after birth was nearly impossible, and the statistics backed it up.
The lump of living entrails reached out its hand toward where it guessed Sindhu must have been standing. Childlike, he squeezed his dirty fingers into a fist, then back into an open palm. Over and over, and over; begging for a morsel to drop into his emaciated hand. Sindhu sighed and blinked slowly, wondering if the thing could even process thoughts any longer. She suspected not, then turned and began walking a short distance to the Pismo Beach pier.
The pier was dilapidated, and she could walk for only about ten feet before reaching a gate with a Restricted Access sign. Beyond the gate she saw dozens of vagrants who had
ignored the sign (assuming they could read it in the first place) and set up makeshift encampments along the pier’s rotting slats. The water lapped near the slats, sometimes spitting foam up through the wood as if the pier were now a cheese grater for the waves. If the water rose any farther in the coming decades, these people would be forced to find a new paradise. She veered north, walking down some similarly rotting steps and onto the sand.
The beach had become a center for commerce. Small aluminum huts lined the edge of the high-tide line where vendors sold or traded their wares. The majority of items for sale consisted of clothing and food. Some higher-end vendors focused on legacy technological devices. Cheap holographic tabletops were the most popular; these obviously had been refurbished several times. Their video quality was subpar, nongranular, and their motion recognition and feedback systems were capable of only simplistic manipulation of the hologram, with no haptic feedback whatsoever. But for those vagrants who still had hope of reaching an improved level of life, these were the devices that could conceivably crack open those heavy doorways.
Beauty, cleanliness, and high-quality clothing combined to make Sindhu appear as a walking digital corp credit. Vendors shouted inanities, profanities, and innuendoes to tempt her into buying their wares instead of their adversaries’. She smiled politely to those who were clever; the rest she ignored. After a pleasant ten-minute walk, where she enjoyed the hypnotic, reverie-inducing sound of the waves, she arrived at a staircase carved into a cliff wall where the beach came to an abrupt end. She climbed the staircase up toward the Dinosaur Caves Park. Once at the top, she turned and looked south. In the distance she could see the Pismo Dunes: the largest official, government-supported slum on the California Central Coast, between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The slum began on the expansive dunes (once a popular playground for vacationers) and stretched for sixty miles inland, up and into the coastal mountains. Outside of the slum border, to the north and east, lay corp farmland; to the south lay an antiquated, but heavily guarded, government military facility. Some of the most affluent housing on the California coast was on corp farmland, just twenty miles north. A strange dichotomy, Sindhu thought, that has become the norm.
She sat down on a bench at the top of the stairs and looked out upon a rocky island outcropping that sat about twenty meters offshore. She was momentarily surprised that no huts or tents resided on the rock; just a mass of birds and bird shit. She figured rightly that the space would be too impractical for use, and anyway, the mass of birds needed a place to huddle and shit. She wondered why they didn’t spread out, find a larger rock, or fly to an unpopulated stretch of beach. Why would they willingly cram hundreds of themselves (and their bird shit) onto one tiny piece of land; it was disgusting. Safety in numbers, I guess, she thought stoically.
Without warning, her vision flashed red. She winked with her right eye to turn on her ocular implants; the earth within her eyes began to twirl wildly. She made a few subtle gestures with her dominant left hand and a text chat appeared in front of her.
BEGIN 256 PETABYTE OpenPGP PUBLIC, PRIVATE, & AUTHORIZED ENCRYPTED CHAT SESSION . . . AFFIRM THREE TIMES TO ACCEPT PUBLIC KEY AND SIGNED CHAT FROM:
GREPMAN:GRP_e9992dd5f134. . .<256PB>. . .7fe23a
[GREPMAN 17:02:08] You’ve been followed.
[SinTh3t!c 17:02:18] That’s impossible.
[GREPMAN 17:02:23] Nothing’s impossible.
[SinTh3t!c 17:02:31] I’ve been cautious. I know what I’m doing.
[GREPMAN 17:02:47] On the beach. Tattered white shirt. He’s looking up, as if beyond you. I’m standing next to him—as a virtGhost that is.
Sindhu glanced casually down the cliff toward the beach. She did notice a tall man looking up toward her. He looked the part of a vagrant, without any ailments. A lithe, possibly hungry body swayed aimlessly in the wind. His eyes were set deep within his face, as if they balanced on his cheeks. He wore a tattered white T-shirt above older, nondescript denim shorts. No shoes. He appeared trancelike; his gaze fixated upon the clouds, or the birds, or . . .
[SinTh3t!c 17:03:04] So—what? His skin is clean so he must be dirty? How do you know?
[GREPMAN 17:03:15] His eyes. I’m looking at them. They’re ocImps.
[SinTh3t!c 17:03:26] Well . . . that could mean anything. So are mine. It doesn’t prove that he’s following me. Why would someone tail me anyway?
[GREPMAN 17:03:37] Are you serious? You are on their watch list, probably top one hundred, maybe even top fifty. With your comp-sci talents and your strident beliefs in wealth equality? Don’t be naive, Sin.
[GREPMAN 17:03:45] Move to a bench at the back of the park, out of his view.
[SinTh3t!c 17:03:47] Fine.
Sindhu frowned. She was fairly certain this was standard protocol. She couldn’t imagine any government or nefarious corp having their eye on her. And besides, she had taken every possible precaution: public transit, network tunneling, encryption, anonymous network traffic routing, going off grid entirely, and a truly grueling and arduous ride on the public magRail system that had included five different switches. She had come this far, though; what was one more simple request? She stood and walked down a row of plastic dwellings—government housing at its finest: interlockable low-income living units, or LILUs. Behind the plastic boxes sat decrepit old houses. Some had been torn down, replaced by more their more efficient LILU counterparts. Those houses that still stood were typically a patchwork of additions and repairs. Many houses had been shoddily connected by haphazard structures joining the two buildings together. At the end of the row she found another concrete bench to sit on; on its face, a weathered plaque denoted the bench’s christening seventy-five years in the past, when this area had once been a shining tourist trap. She sighed as she sat.
[GREPMAN 17:07:51] Better.
[SinTh3t!c 17:08:00] Why would they follow me in real-world? Why not just follow me as a virtGhost, like you?
[GREPMAN 17:08:05] I thought you were top of your class.
[SinTh3t!c 17:08:12] Would you like me to ask our mysterious follower for a job? I bet he’d hire me without this shit.
[GREPMAN 17:08:14] I bet not.
[SinTh3t!c 17:08:17] Answer please?
[GREPMAN 17:08:27] He wants to get somewhere that virts can’t access.
[SinTh3t!c 17:08:30] And where’s that?
[GREPMAN 17:08:40] The same place you are trying to get to: us, in realWorld.
[SinTh3t!c 17:08:52] I’m trying to get to SOP and Simeon. I don’t know who the fuck you are, Mr. GrepMan. What kind of name is GREPMAN? Are you some kind of unix superhero?
[GREPMAN 17:09:02] You’re a funny girl. We didn’t have in our records that you minored in comedy. Look toward the stairs.
Sindhu looked down the row of dwellings, as her eyes focused away from the vagrants milling outside of their plastic boxes, she saw the white-shirted man’s head rise above the stairs. He stopped as he reached the top and moved off to his left. His gaze still appeared focused on the sky.
[SinTh3t!c 17:09:07] What do we do?
[GREPMAN 17:09:19] We have procedures . . . But . . . the procedure usually involves evacuating. Shit. This is not good. I need to huddle with folks. I’ll be back. Don’t do ANYTHING. Got it?
[SinTh3t!c 17:09:25] Yes sir Super GrepMan sir.
Simeon looked over his shoulder to the couch that Grepman was virtTripping on. Grepman was sprawled on the couch appearing to be asleep: He was breathing consistently, like a metronome, peaceful. In fact, Grepman was interacting virtually with a real-time rendering of the slum that Sindhu was currently sitting in. The virt of the beach was being rendered by a combination of local vid feeds and several overhead satellite feeds. To Grepman, it was as if he was standing on the beach as a ghost; he could see everyone but they couldn’t see him. At this moment, Grepman had jumped back into the room, at least partially, still as a virtGhost.
Simeon glanced over to the holographic version of Grepman that had just appeared in the room—a
50 percent replica of the real thing that was now standing on a holographic oblong tabletop display, surrounded by the rest of the group. Grepman’s holograph representation wore a tight-fitting black shirt atop a pair of slick slacks. He appeared roughly similar to the man slumped on the couch, though slightly enhanced. His holographic self glanced questioningly at Simeon. Simeon sat back in his chair, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, as the yellow flames of his aniToo licked his arm playfully.
“We can assume everything the T-shirt man is seeing is being instantly beamed back to NRS, or whatever security subsidiary they are hiding behind this time,” Simeon almost whispered.
“Definitely. And if we . . . immobilize him, for lack of a better word, that will most definitely spike alarms somewhere,” Jay-san added.
“We could send her home,” Nimbus said, looking directly at Simeon. “If we send her home, she probably can’t come back here again, ’cause that would set off alarms that something important must be here. If she doesn’t come back, they probably just assume this was a vacation and there’s nothing to see here.”
“No way.” Simeon shook his head. He placed both hands on the table. “If we send her home, it’s almost a dead giveaway that she realized she was being tailed. Come on—we talked about this. The fact that we had her go through so many security hoops to get here shows that she’s somewhere important—”
“I told you guys,” Chicklet whined, then crossed his arms emphatically.
“Go frag yourself, Chick,” Mitlee rejoined as she hit her littler-by-two-minutes brother in the shoulder, slightly harder than playfully.
Simeon wore a pursed smile as he watched the kids. “Kids—calm down, this is serious. Chicklet, you had a good idea at the time, and it looks like you were right. We should have had her come straight here—no pretense—and sold it as a . . . minivacation, or something. But hindsight and server logs are twenty-twenty.”
Idempotency Page 19